Month: September 2018

Lisa Adkins’ new book, The Time of Money, is brilliant and, I think, extremely important. But I also find it quite perplexing in terms of its overall stance and motivation.

The basic argument of the book is that speculative financial operations are central to social life and experience today. Capitalism has moved from an extractive regime (generating surplus from exploiting labor) to a speculative regime (generating surplus from speculative financial transactions). In this way, finance is in no sense superstructural or extrinsic to the “real economy”; rather, it directly and entirely makes over the entire realm of the social. And in particular, financial speculation makes over our concept and experience of time. Under industrial capitalism, we experience time as a uniform and extrinsic measure: labor power is a commodity measured in units of time, and commodities in general are subject to universal equivalence through the socially necessary time of their production. But we are now, instead, subject to speculative time:

Time is not a thing that simply passes or that contains and orders events, nor is it something that moves in one direction or another, proceeding, for example, chronologically, progressively, or sequentially, with the past standing behind the present and the future unfolding from the now. Speculative time is a time in which pasts, presents, and futures stand not in a predetermined or pre-set relation to each other but are in a continuous state of movement, transformation, and unfolding. It is this form of time that belongs to the time of securitized debt. Thus, in the time of securitized debt, futures may remediate not only the present but also the past; the present and its relation to the past and the future may be reset in one action (via, e.g., index rolling); pasts and presents can be forwarded and futures and presents backwarded. It is, moreover, along the flows of these nonchronological pasts, presents, and futures, including their reordering and resetting and even their suspension, that channels for profit are yielded. In short, in the time of securitized debt, the time of profit lies in the nonchronological and indeterminate movements of speculative time.

This new sort of time is not only the time of derivatives and other arcane financial instruments; for it completely penetrates and transforms everyday experience as well. Individuals and households are now subjected to speculative time. It is no longer the case that wages compensate labor, and provide the basis for social reproduction (the old, Keyensian-Fordist model, under which the man’s labor provided for the commodity needs of the household, like food and shelter, while women worked inside the home in uncompensated domestic labor). Instead, wages are no longer sufficient to meet household needs, even if women as well as men enter full time into the workforce. Similarly, so-called “welfare reform” means that the state no longer provides necessities for the unemployed, but instead forces even people without jobs to engage in incessant, uncompensated labor.

For both the employed and the unemployed, and for both men and women, wages today do not provide enough to get by (enough for social reproduction), as they used to do in the Fordist era; instead, we are all required to use our wages for speculative investment, by accumulating debt as well as by enlisting what money we supposedly have in speculative schemes from which banks, realtors, etc. can draw more and more surplus. We are now continually indebted for life; financial institutions lend us more than we will ever be able to pay back, because they make their money not so much on the ultimate repayment of their loans as on the packaging and sale of these obligations in the form of derivatives, credit default swaps, etc. etc. I will never get my Visa debt, or my mortgage, down to zero; for one thing, I do not earn enough to pay down these debts in my lifetime, and for another thing, I am continually offered the prospect of rolling over and renegotiating these debts, which serves to perpetuate them ad infinitum. None of the financial institutions to which I owe these debts is interested in my paying them off and becoming debt-free; they would rather that I continue to pay them off without ever fulfilling my “obligation.” They make more money by buying and selling such accumulated debts, and their associated income streams of continual payments, than they ever would by getting me to pay back the principal.

In this way, the everyday experience of individuals and households, and the everyday money we use to buy basic goods and services, are entirely subsumed by, and subjected to, the speculative time of finance. This means that in the current regime of debt time is not emptied out, or deprived of a future, in the way that Lazzarato and other critics have claimed; rather, our experience of temporality is more intense and convoluted than ever before. We are compelled to live according to the speculative time of finance; we cannot simply remember the past and anticipate or project into the future, but must micro-organize every aspect of our lives, and of our temporal experience, in accordance with the never-completed and continually-reshaped necessities of debt servicing:

Such [repayment] schedules—operating for the waged, the employed, the unwaged, the jobless, the underemployed, and the unemployed—have not only rewritten the relationship between household and personal debt and income but tie populations across whole lifetimes to the movements of speculative time, a time in which the relationships between the past, present, and future are not fixed but open to constant adjustment. Contemporary debt, then, does not destroy time by tying populations to futures that can never be their own but opens out a universe in which they are tied to the indeterminate movements of speculative time. This is a time through and in which the productivity of populations is maximized via the flows and movements of money.

I find Adkins’ account compelling. She makes a powerful argument for the claim that speculative finance entirely and massively “rewrites the social.” This is clearly in tension with Marxist claims that are based in the primacy of roduction, and that understand financial instruments as “ficticious capital.” But in a broader sense, I find Adkins’ account still congruent with the larger Marxist understanding that social processes are based, “in the last instance,” upon the extraction and expropriation of a surplus generated in the course of human life activity (or what Marx called “species being” in his early writings, and specified in terms of productive activity in his later writings). I think that the expropriation and accumulation of a surplus is the most crucial point – which is why, for instance, I have never been troubled, as many orthodox Marxists have been, with something like Sraffa’s understanding of surplus extraction and accumulation. It is the extraction (or theft from the public) of the surplus that is crucial, whether this is understood in terms of labor commodified as labor power (Marx), of physical production (Sraffa), or of financial speculation (in Adkins’ model). And in the contrary case, it is this failure to recognize the expropriation of a surplus, in any of these modes, that characterizes bourgeois economics. [Right-wing populism sometimes denounces “parasites,” who can be bankers (presumptively Jewish), as well as welfare recipients (presumptively Black) and violent criminals (presumtively Latino), but it never offers a social and systematic account of surplus expropriation].

So from this point of view, I see Adkins’ understanding as a useful one, and indeed as a way of showing that financial activities are fully material processes, as against “the ongoing identification of money and finance as immaterial or superstructural phenomena,” as other Left theorists, such as Mauricio Lazzarato, have tended to claim:

contra Lazzarato, the emergence of such everyday forms of money as a nonrepresentational surface that must be put in motion and practices that ensure that the productive capacities of populations are maximized toward such speculative activities is neither immaterial nor does it operate outside of the coordinates of the social world.

I think Adkins is right that financial speculation is a fully material process, not a parasitic superstructure to the economy. Just as I find Sraffa as a useful supplement to Marx with his emphasis on physical production, I see Adkins as useful for her emphasis on speculative movement. This is despite the fact that, just as my worry with Sraffa is that his theory seems to offer no place for contemporary finance (circulation as itself a productive activity), so my symmetrically opposite worry with Adkins is that, even if we accept her contention about the centrality of financial speculation, she seems to write as if physical production didn’t exist at all any longer. When wages no longer allow for social reproduction of the individual or household, condemning people therefore to enter into endless speculative spirals of debt, isn’t this because people still need to obtain physical stuff in order to survive, or in order to maintain what Marx saw as the socially-defined level of subsistence (which is not the same as minimal physical subsistence, since it also includes, in the US for instance, such things as mobile phones)?

This limitation of Adkins’ theory is not in itself fatal — I accept that what she is writing about is indeed crucial, even if it is not total — but it leads me to the perplexity I mentioned at the start. Adkins’ tone is polemical, even vitriolically so, when she denounces other accounts of neoliberal economy and of financial speculation. She continually attacks “normative assumptions” such as the way that “the expansion of finance has been taken to be destructive of the future, to interfere with the proper flow of time, and to threaten to return us to previous, unenlightened eras.” While I understand Adkins’ desire to get away from “normative” ideas about temporality, I don’t see why she needs to make so extreme an opposition. I don’t think want to try to subsume these opposed images of time in some sort of Hegelian sublation, but I also don’t think they exclude one another as absolutely as Adkins says (I prefer to see it in terms of a Kantian antinomy, in which the opposed terms are mutually implicated, in a way that refuses any possibility of Hegelian sublation). She is quite positive in denouncing these other visions of futurity, but frustratingly vague in explaining the contrasting details of the speculative time of finance. Sometimes Adkins refers to the schedules of speculative time as “calendrics”; this puts me in mind of Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire space opera trilogy, in which calendrics are the basic tools of imperial domination. As is so often the case with science fiction, Lee’s trilogy is much more detailed in its consideration of oppressive calendrics and how they might operate, than Adkins’ sociological text dares to be.

Adkins shows how time is produced in the current neoliberal regime of financial speculation, so that we are bound to a very powerful, if indeterminate and continually shifting and changing, sort of futurity. This is entirely in line with Foucault’s (and Deleuze and Guattari’s) idea that power is generative rather than repressive. But such an ordering — an enslavement, really, to contingency, possibility, and irreducible risk — is not really opposed to the idea of capitalist realism (Mark Fisher), according to which we cannot imagine a future that is in rupture from the ongoing neoliberal present. Rather, the two are conjoined. In what Deleuze calls the society of control (rightly cited by Adkins), we are continually indebted (rather than serially imprisoned in a series of institutions as was the case in the disciplinary society), but this perpetual indebtedness, while it binds us to a very particular set of obligations that entirely determine our future, can also be said to be denying us any difference in the future. We cannot imagine anything different from financial capitalism, because we cannot imagine anything different than a regime of continually metamorphosing futures which, for all their uncertainty, generate a surplus that financial institutions expropriate from us, while leaving us exposed to risks for which there is no social remedy (since the structures of the welfare state have been systematicaly dismantled). Our binding to complex nonlinear regimes of futurity is precisely what makes other senses of futurity impossible.

My puzzlement grows even further when I reflect how Adkins suggests that the speculative time of finance is closely akin to the speculative accounts of time that we find in contemporary feminist and new materialist philosophy (she specifically mentions Karen Barad, Elizabeth Grosz, and Iris van der Tuin, among others). But though she mentions this, she doesn’t follow up on the observation. The speculative temporalities advanced by these thinkers are intended to offer us liberatory alternatives to the oppressions of normative, linear clock time. Should we think instead that they are just accurate descriptions of our current mode of oppression? I have sometimes made this move with regard to Deleuze and Guattari; for instance, I have suggested that their notions of the rhizomatic, of smooth space, of micropolitics, etc., are not forms of liberation, but precisely the tools that allow us to apprehend how neoliberal power and exploitation operate. Nothing is more rhizomatic than contemporary finance capital, and nothing is more exploitative. Should we say the same for feminist and new materialist temporal speculation? Is there any alternative temporality at all, if it turns out that these supposedly liberatory accounts are really just mechanisms of finance capital? That is what Adkins implies. But she never quite comes out and says this. And of course, convinced as I am by her arguments, I nonetheless do not want to accept this grim conclusion. And we should also consider — although Adkins does not — the alternative, speculative temporalities proposed by Afrofuturists from Sun Ra to Rasheedah Philips, which refer both to the past and the future, against an oppressive present and against enslavement to linearity. Are these too merely expressions of the logic of financial speculation? Can speculative fiction be disentangled from speculative finance? This is the biggest question that Adkins leaves me with, and to which she does not offer any sort of answer.